Perspectives

Arguments, observations and unfinished thoughts, kept honest enough to change later.

  1. Two lit rooms seen from outside at dusk, with a dark gap between them
    8 min readPerspectives

    What's your perspective on AI?

    In one room I sound like a shill and in the other like a sceptic. Both sides of the AI argument arrive with the answer already decided.

  2. Two people weave loose threads at the edge of a vast ordered tapestry.
    6 min readPerspectives

    The exceptions were the job

    AI can remove routine tasks while leaving people with harder exceptions and fewer chances to build judgement. The easy work was carrying part of the job.

  3. Three painted circular forms in teal, cream and muted orange consume and reshape one another as their scopes overlap.
    5 min readPerspectives

    BA, PO and PM are three different crafts

    Officially a month into product management after years of business analysis, still nerding out about what each of these roles actually does well.

  4. A person holds a ladder at a cliff edge while a group walks towards a different horizon below.
    3 min readPerspectives

    The thing that got you here is now in the way

    The quality that made you good can become the thing in your way. Why unlearning is harder than learning, and why almost nobody will tell you it's happening.

  5. A still person stands between translucent figures rehearsing movement on both sides.
    3 min readPerspectives

    Why you freeze when it matters

    Knowing what to say and being able to say it are separately acquired. How to get reps deliberately, and when the freeze is information rather than a gap.

  6. Four people sail a rough sea while a weighted line probes the unseen depth below them.
    3 min readPerspectives

    You might be running on vibes

    You can execute perfectly and still have no structure underneath it. Teaching is the only reliable way to find out what you actually understand.

  8. A manager peers through a small window at one working moment while a much larger landscape of work unfolds unseen.
    3 min readPerspectives

    Your manager sees about a quarter of what you do

    You see all of your work. Your manager sees maybe a quarter, and not because they're bad at their job. For anyone who thinks good work should speak for itself.

  10. A hiker chooses between a clear mountain path and a thorn-covered path that loops back on itself.
    4 min readPerspectives

    Not all discomfort is building you

    Three kinds of hard, and the dangerous one is indistinguishable from the good one. How to check whether you're learning or just coping.

  11. One person walks through repeated calendar doorways while others gather evidence along a winding path.
    4 min readPerspectives

    You might have years without having experience

    Ten years in one place and five jobs in five years produce the same shallow judgment. Experience is a feedback loop closing on you, not a duration.

  12. A person struggles along a coastal path carrying an unstable tower of papers, boxes and books.
    3 min readPerspectives

    The weekend that broke me

    Sixty hours in an office, one immovable deadline, and what I learned about my own judgment when appreciation turned out to be the entire transaction.

  13. A person tends a small green plant in a mostly empty studio lit by a narrow patch of warmth.
    3 min readPerspectives

    The selfish reason to still care

    Detachment is a rational response to corporate work. It also dulls the judgment you were protecting. On caring about the craft rather than the company.

  14. A winding path connects repeated scenes of speaking, presenting and practising towards a distant figure.
    3 min readPerspectives

    The reps are already there

    People who handle pressure well aren't less tired. They stay present, which is the switch that lets everything you've already learned actually fire.

  15. One person is buried under art supplies and other people's work while four colleagues watch.
    3 min readPerspectives

    Why being helpful is a trap

    Most requests are solutions in disguise. One question, asked at one moment, that saves quarters of wasted work, and the situations where it backfires.

  17. Blurred workers circle calendars and empty chairs while a stone remains still at the centre.
    3 min readPerspectives

    A packed week that moved almost nothing

    Everyone quotes the eighty-twenty rule and most of us live the inverse. Why attention flows to the small stuff automatically, and what to protect instead.

  19. A person sits compressed into a narrow office chair beside an open view of mountains and water.
    3 min readPerspectives

    The job was fine, so why did it flatten me

    The work was fine and I still finished every day flattened. On the difference between a bad job and a lonely one, and the cost of carrying it alone.

  21. Informal conversations and hand-offs form an orange network beneath a faded formal organisation chart.
    4 min readPerspectives

    The org chart nobody wrote down

    Every project runs on two layers. One is documented and being automated fast. The other decides whether the project lives, and it was never written down.

  22. A ceramicist selects one glowing vessel from rows of similar handmade pots.
    4 min readPerspectives

    Taste is the thing you can't download

    Language models are built to return the average. Taste is judgment shaped by evidence only you have, which is why it holds value when tools are shared.

  25. Five people study a network of connected decisions behind a closed document in the foreground.
    3 min readPerspectives

    The document is just the receipt

    You can spend three days on a perfect specification and move nobody's understanding. Why the visible half of knowledge work keeps eating the valuable half.